Working-class culture is under assault by political elites seeking to denormalise a way of life. This state of affairs exists because the major parties are afflicted with Mary Poppins syndrome – they won't rest until Britons are practically perfect in every way.

It may sound anachronistic but working-class communities are experiencing an invasion of the public health toffs (PHTs). The primary object of the PHTs' ire is Average Joe, the stereotypical, overweight, working-class male who's a junk food addict and a betting shop regular, when he isn't impersonating a beer-swilling, chain-smoking couch potato – and they're also not fond of Average Jane's "addiction" to an artificial tan.

Joe and Jane are the subject of a PHT-designed regulatory experiment to improve their habits and preferences in order to improve the nation's health.

This assault on their culture is justified by the PHTs' acceptance of health paternalism, which provides the driving force behind the regulatory assault on inappropriate eating, drinking, smoking, gambling, and even tanning. For the PHTs, all of these activities are inappropriate because they pose unacceptable risks to healthy living.

Health promotion disseminates "the truth" about health, disease, and lifestyle through providing the state with a menu of policy options that will change individual and societal beliefs. Furthermore, the state ensures that its citizens, even if they are unwilling or unable, conform to the alleged scientific consensus about what it means to be healthy.

The PHTs' conception of health replaces not only the values of the individual, but also the individual's weighing of risk and reward. At considerable cost to individual liberty, the state's propaganda and regulatory powers are employed to define and enforce the PHTs' vision of what constitutes "the good life".

Health paternalism is committed to using the mechanisms of social engineering to ease the pleasures of working-class life gradually out of existence. Today, it's sufficient for PHTs to simply utter the dreaded U-word – "unhealthy" – and pleasures of whatever pedigree are doomed.

This is truly totalitarian, in the sense that the project is all-embracing: to save the body, we must re-engineer the soul. Democratic society has no place for the state to structure Joe and Jane's respective pleasures and pass judgment on what they might choose to eat, drink, or smoke.

The war on working-class culture is, in truth, a war on what PHTs consider illegitimate, even immoral, pleasure. Unsurprisingly, therefore, much of what passes for health promotion science fails to meet the standards of evidence-based medicine. Our report reviews numerous examples of junk science employed to justify the PHTs' war on working-class cultural habits.

That the political elite feels electorally inoculated from its assault on the still-largest social cohort confirms that working-class culture may dominate the nation, but working-class interests don't dominate Westminster – and won't after next week's election.

Yet, there's a growing sense in working-class communities of suffering endless condescension, a feeling that urbane Britain has written off their culture as aberrant or worse.

So, public health issues may matter more in future elections, as working-class voters come to see those issues as a test of whether politicians respect their culture or abhor it. This will create an opportunity for the first party leader to stand athwart the establishment's regulatory march yelling, "Stop!"

• The Democracy Institute's Patrick Basham and John Luik launch their report, The war on working-class culture: How political elites denormalise a way of life, on Thursday evening in Westminster at the Institute of Economic Affairs